Writing With (some) Net Up

Iambic? Nearly always. Pentameter? Now and then.

Photo by Juho S on Unsplash

My mother, a notable seamstress, once patched a table tennis net using scraps of pink lace left over from a bridesmaid’s dress she’d made for my sister. Picture that net — with Robert Frost’s dictum in mind — while you read these two poems.

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<< Cold weather's best. >>


Cold weather’s best.

Summer heat
sends passions pacing hotfoot through the street,
robs dreams of rest,
feeds blood-fire till it flushes out to meet
the sun’s hot fingers where they rub your skin.

Cold drives you in;

to learn the price of fire,
to learn to tend the hearth of long desire
between walls wrapped with wind,
all storms shut out, and silence all shut in,
all heat contained, all embers coalesced.

Cold weather’s best.

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WHEN YOU NEED MORE LIGHT


Set something on fire.
Run a current through a wire.

Read for the words that shine through lies.
Now memorize.

Say something true with your voice or body or pen.
Say it again.

Wait for the sun to rise.
Now open your eyes.

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[You can hear an audio reading of the poems by using the widget above the photograph.]

In my first post about rhymed and metred poetry I went all classical and showed you a sonnet and a villanelle. Serious net, right, Mr. Frost? Correct height and width, defining the boundaries of the court — defining the game, really — in a whole new dimension. I get what you like about that. I do.

Sometimes, though, I find myself on the court with a different kind of net. Oddly patched, oddly sized, looking as if it got borrowed from a whole other game. Do I wait for a regulation net to show up? Do I walk off the court? Or do I, well, play?

“Play,” of course, being the operative word.

I wrote the “cold weather” poem in my twenties, when I was Very Serious about many things and not much of my writing would admit to being play. I suspect, though, that I had fun writing this one — the metric swing of it, the (contained! coalesced!) sensuality. “When You Need More Light” popped up just a couple of weeks ago, when I was feeling glum after making three starts at a Very Serious poem that flatly refused to be written. The first couplet spoke itself in my head and I laughed and brushed it off, but it wouldn’t go away … so I started playing with it, and lo and behold it brought a few more couplets to join the game, with here a rhyme and there a rhyme and a distinctive cadence if not a metre.

I think my point is — and don’t tell Mr. Frost I said so — there’s more than one kind of net, and ‘way more than one set of rules. The question becomes: am I here for the rules, or for a game? Because if it’s for a game, then this oddball net will do just fine. Let’s play.

About the ping-pong net patched with pink lace: Yeah, that’s a poem, isn’t it? One I haven’t written yet. I owe you, Mom.